Free The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 by Maxim Jakubowski Page A

overcoat who almost stepped on Sam. The old man didn’t even seem to see him, as he shuffled across the lobby.
    “Old age is hell,” Sam thought.
    Tyler Sproul rounded the corner at that very moment and walked around the man shoveling snow off the sidewalk. Moving purposefully in her high heels over the slick sidewalk, she sucked in a deep breath of brisk air as she approached the front door of the old Klamath Hotel. She wondered what Sam would look like at thirty-five. She wondered what he’d think of her now.
    Entering through the revolving door, Tyler stopped just inside the doorway and looked around. The old hotel smelled musty, stuffy from forced-air heat. Tyler felt her face flush in the sudden warmth just as she saw Sam. He smiled at her as he rose from his chair. She felt her breath catch as she recognized that same smile from high school, the smile he’d flashed her way after winning the state swimming title, all those years ago.
    She noticed a streak of silver along the temples of Sam’s dark hair, and a deep tan on his exquisite face, and those light blue eyes that looked like the morning sky on a bright summer day. He still had his swimmer’s physique, tall and lean. He also had a moustache now.
    Sam studied her as he crossed the lobby on legs that felt suddenly weak. Her hair was shorter but still reddish brown, parted down the center now. She was still slender, with her legs still long and shapely. She was wearing a burgundy dress and a gold topcoat that she removed as he arrived.
    Stopping in front of her, Sam looked into her green eyes. He saw something in them that made him smile even wider. His most vivid memory of Tyler was the liveliness of her green eyes, the youthful sparkle in them. He realized he had been most worried about her eyes, rather than what she looked like now as a woman. He wanted her eyes to be lively, more than anything.
    Tyler felt a swell of emotion crawling up her throat, felt a stiffness in her back, a salty wetness in her eyes. She blinked. She thought he was about to say something, but when he opened his mouth his lips began to shake, so he closed it and just stared at her with those warm blue eyes.
    He found himself studying every detail of her face. It was still the face from his dreams; only there were lines now, on her cheeks where she smiled and smaller lines next to her eyes. She still had that triangular face, the pointy chin, the nearly perfect nose, those well-formed lips he’d never tasted. He found himself staring at her lower lip, which was fuller than her upper lip.
    Tyler always loved the small cleft in the center of Sam’s chin. She found herself looking at his moustache, his wide dark mustache that looked so soft. And when she looked up at his eyes, she saw they were now damp.
    No longer a girl, Tyler had become a truly beautiful woman. And when she smiled it was the same smile of that young girl from the halls of his dreams. Tyler had the warmest, nicest, most beautiful smile Sam had ever seen . . . ever. He could see the wetness in
her
eyes now. She blinked again at him.
    They both let out a nervous sigh. Sam reached his hand out, and she took it and squeezed it.
    The palm of his hand felt moist.
    “How about that steak I promised?” His voice was scratchy and he cleared his throat immediately and smiled again.
    She nodded, biting her lower lip, blinking her eyes once more to keep the wetness from rolling down her cheeks.

    She ached for him to touch her. All evening she wanted to feel his touch on her skin. Now, in his hotel room, on the second floor of the old Klamath, two days before Christmas of her thirty-fifth year, with the plates from their steak dinner still sitting on the small table against the window, Tyler felt Sam’s arms wrapping around her. She pulled herself to him. She let out an involuntary sigh and tightly shut her eyes.
    Sam felt all the evening’s tension slip away as he hugged her, as she snuggled her cheek against his, as she